“No,” I whisper.
“Yes, you do. You think your blood is better, your bones are better.” As he talks he moves my wet hair off my neck. “You’re just a better cut of meat, I guess. Some people are born that way, nothing you can do about it. But you know what?” His fingers feel like worms on my neck, dry worms running up and down. He tightens his grip, leans down, and whispers in my ear. “I said, you know what?”
“What?” I whisper to the wall.
“Here’s something we know about in LA: meat is meat.”
He has me wedged against the wall, his fingers tangled in my hair, his hips grinding against my shoulder as he presses me harder and harder. I know he’s waiting for me to push him away. That will be his moment to strike. For some reason, Scot’s words about football flash into my mind, so clear it’s like he’s in the room with me, about how quarterbacks read movement on the field, how they look for patterns instead of at individual players, how they see danger and opportunity in masses of moving bodies. Just do something. Make a move. I can hear Scot’s voice in my head: Call the play.
So I put the book down. I put my hands on the kitchen table, and I stand up. Mike Lyle is not tall, and that gives me one second’s advantage. Right into those light eyes of his, I smile at him, like everything is going according to plan and he’s gotten everything all wrong, as usual. That surprises him, and for a split second, he looks uncertain. There are about six inches of space between us. I lean into it. He steps back. I step forward.
“I’ll bet you don’t know why I came,” I whisper at him. He waits for me to tell him. I don’t tell him anything. He folds his arms over his chest.
“I sure as shit know you didn’t come for me.” But he’s not so sure he couldn’t be persuaded. I keep smiling. He hasn’t fumbled anything yet, but his grip on the football is not firm. But, like Scot said, you can’t wait for the other guy to lose.
“Are you sure about that?” I ask. “Would you bet the farm on it?” Then I wait, and watch. I hear Scot’s voice in my head like I’m a quarterback with a wired helmet. The other team has the ball, but eventually they’ll fumble, and when I intercept it, I’m going to run like hell. Wait, says the voice in the helmet. Wait. Waiting is action, Scot says. Let him make the move now. My question still hangs in the air.
Slowly, as I wait, I watch ego start to fight with reality, all over Mike’s face. I don’t let myself think about anything but football. That keeps the fear away. I release my tight hold on Grimshaw’s bathrobe, and it falls open, and I let him search for what’s underneath. Never taking my eyes off him, I slowly reach out and pick up Grimshaw’s menthols, which she left on the table. I brush past him and walk to the sink. When I get there, I pivot, just like a stripper. I put the cigarette in my mouth.
“Have a light?”
“Ah…” He starts patting all his pockets and then he sees Grimshaw’s lighter on the table. “Here we go.” He picks it up and holds it out for me. I inhale and hold the smoke in my lungs for a minute. My mother said Mike Lyle wasn’t very bright. Let’s hope she’s right.
“Melody’s pregnant.” I don’t know where that one comes from. But it works.
Mike swallows. “She is? She is not. Are you sure?” He looks like a bone is stuck sideways in his throat.
“Are you?” I blow a smoke ring at him. “Yeah.” I laugh. “Pretty soon that vanity plate will be on a used minivan just like Mrs. Grimshaw’s. ‘Viper.’ And that’s the closest you’ll get to it, Mike. Grimshaws come by the dozen, you know. Lots of little vipers.” I tap the ashes onto the floor and take another drag.
Mike turns around and looks through the window at his car. And I see the way forward. I’m going to take his upward mobility away from him, and then I’m going to sell it back to him at a very high price. When he turns to me again, he’s frowning. I answer his next question before he can ask it.
“She sent me a postcard about it. How do you think I knew where to find you? She wants to go home.” I blow smoke in his face. “But I don’t.” He studies me, and then a slow, crooked grin softens his face, as if now he understands what the problem was all along.
“Why?” he says. “You want to go in the bedroom and fool around?” In the bathroom, the dryer buzzes. I brush by him. I turn around in the bathroom doorway, put my arms over my head, for my final pose. His mouth is open.
“I don’t fool around with other women’s guys,” I announce. In his breast pocket, his cell phone rings. It startles him, and he fumbles for it. It’s Grimshaw. I can hear her demanding to know where he is. He doesn’t answer her.
“It’ll be my first time,” I sort of breathe at him. “Let’s make it special.” And then I go into the bathroom, close the door behind me, and lock it. I put my forehead against the mirror and close my eyes.
“Help us God, help us God, help us God,” I pray.
twelve
THE NEXT DAY, GRIMSHAW AND I are out on the Golden State Freeway with our thumbs out. I’m holding up the word EAST, which I drew on the front inside cover of my upward mobility notebook. Within minutes, a vintage Chevy pulls over and stops.
“I can’t believe he did that,” Grimshaw says, picking up her suitcase.
“It’s amazing all the old cars you see out here,” I comment. “Ruby would love it.”
“He didn’t even explain!” She shakes her head. “He was the one with all the plans for us. Big dreams.” I can see two soldiers sitting in the front of the car, all dressed up in camo gear. “He was gonna manage me,” she says. “All the way to the top.”
I hold open the rear door of the Chevy for her. She stands there, still talking.
“He comes in, I’m, like, with a customer. He calls me a liar—right in front of the guy! Jesus. That is so unprofessional. I tell him we’ll discuss it later—” Before I get in the car, she hits me on the arm, demonstrating how hard Mike had hit her. It wasn’t very hard. “Because I was talking to this guy,” she continues. “A customer! So it really wasn’t that cool at all.”
We get in the car. “He thinks he can get away with throwing his weight around ’cause he’s the manager. But he’s wrong. There’s an owner, too.”
We pull out into traffic. The soldier on the passenger side turns around. “What kind of music can we play for you ladies?”
“Jazz,” I tell him. “But not too loud.”
That shuts them up. A thick silence settles over us, which will last for the rest of the day, punctuated every twenty minutes by a sharp sigh from Grimshaw. She doesn’t say any more about Mike or about the events of last night. She doesn’t know what happened between me and Mike. I want to tell her—I tried to tell her. The body stocking, what he was ready to do to me. But I’m not even sure what happened myself. At one point, she checks her watch.
“I should be at work right now,” she says.
“Don’t think about it” is my only advice.
We stare out our respective windows. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her about what happened with me and Mike. I meant to. I mean, for her own sake, I should tell her that he intended to—I don’t even know what he intended, to settle some old score, maybe—then what would have happened? But the Over Easy was so weird—I ran the whole way there, and when I walked through the door, there was a girl that at first I thought was Grimshaw in a wig, up in a little fenced-off stage wearing nothing but high heels and a big smile. The place wasn’t what I expected: lots of chairs upholstered in green velvet, little Frisbee-sized tables, a few men sitting alone close to the stage staring intently at the girl, and a couple more men not really looking at anything. I’d been in bus stations with more atmosphere than that. But I didn’t stop to stare. I strode through the place like I knew exactly where I was going. Down the length of the room, according to her drawing in my upward mobility notebook, through a door to the left of the stage, down the stairs, take a right, down four more stairs, walk toward the light and through a beaded curtain. Grimshaw had told me where the dressing rooms were. Sur
e enough, she was in there, alone, wearing a bathrobe, sitting in front of a mirror, putting the finishing touches on her makeup. When I walked through the door, she jumped up with another big hug for me. Before I could tell her what happened with Mike, she started telling me how motivating it was that I came. She still had the same dreams, she said, and she was feeling settled enough in her new life that she was going to start looking for studios and a teacher. It was her private dream, she said, apart from Mike, so—she stopped talking and got this faraway look in her eyes. “I still have to figure that part out.” She started putting on this tiny gladiator outfit, with straps and rivets, and tiny patches of sheer camo material in all the places you’d expect.
“That’s not what the girl upstairs is wearing,” I said.
“I’m developing an act,” she said. “That’s how you get a following. That’s why I like Monday nights. They’re lousy for tips, but you get a chance to try new things. This place used to be nothing much, but it’s getting a lot classier now that Mike’s running it. They’ll wake up when I go out there—you watch. Some say I’m the best in the city. They say I should go to Vegas. You should see it in here on weekends.” She stood in front of me holding her hair up, and I tied two ties, one at her neck and one down her back.
“Busy?” I asked.
“Insane.” While she put on her shoes, each one of which needed to be laced up to the knee, Grimshaw chattered about the money and opportunity and fascinating people that the Over Easy had brought into her life. The dressing room was long and rectangular. Gunmetal gray lockers, just like the ones at Colchis High, lined two walls. Mirrors lined the other two. A cigarette burned in an ashtray among the pots and tubes of makeup, adding to the tobacco smoke already embedded in the air. The smoke got into my brain and clouded it over, and I couldn’t remember anything or make sense of anything. Even if I did tell her what happened, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t take his side, like she did before. Nobody had invited me out here, after all. All I got was a postcard with an address—the rest was my doing. When I sat down on a metal folding chair, all the coffee that had been artificially holding me up drained out through my feet and into the floor.
Grimshaw told me how much I inspired her by challenging myself at school. “You just did it,” she said. “You just decided and did what you had to do. That’s actually when I decided to leave, when you made the high honor roll like that. I thought, wow, I guess that’s how you do it.”
“So it was your idea to leave Colchis?” I asked.
“Mine. I said to Mike, let’s go.”
The smoke in my head cleared enough to let one thought through: Go home. “Could I use your phone?” I asked.
“When Mike comes in,” she said. “Mike has it.”
When she said his name like that, twice, it came like a one-two punch. I felt so defeated. All I wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up in my own bed in Colchis.
I had just enough strength to say, “I hope you’re not giving him all your money.”
“So what if I am?” Her mouth tightened. “It’s still my money. Dreams need investment. That’s what he says.” She glared at herself in the mirror and took another drag on her cigarette, carefully, so as not to smear her lipstick. A speaker crackled on the wall. A male voice said, “Cinnamon—you’re on in one.”
“Gotta go,” she said brightly.
“Cinnamon,” I said. “Is that you?”
“You’re not allowed to use your own name,” she said primly. “Because of stalkers.” She checked herself in the mirror, front and back.
The girl I had seen out front came in, kicked off her heels, put on a bathrobe, lit a cigarette, and put her feet up on the makeup counter. Grimshaw introduced me as her best friend from home.
“Hey,” the girl said to me. “I’m telling Mike to close on Mondays. It’s like dancing in a cemetery.”
“He won’t,” said Grimshaw.
“Shit,” the girl said. “I’d rather dance for my goldfish.”
“Well, I’m on now.” She turned to me.
“Is there any place here where a body could sleep?” I asked.
Grimshaw pointed to a pile of clothes in the corner. “There’s a mattress under there.” I lay down on lumps of sequins and feathers that smelled like sweat and other bodily fluids and sank immediately into sleep.
* * *
It takes a long time to get out of LA, but eventually we make it to the edge of the city and the beginning of nothing. The National Guard lets us out in front of a SPEED LIMIT 65 sign, where we stand until just before nightfall. Traffic is sparse.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” Grimshaw says. “At this time of night, rattlesnakes come out of the ditches to lie in the road because it’s still warm.”
“It doesn’t sound like anything I’d do if I were a rattlesnake.”
“Mike says they do.”
A truck approaches. She runs out in the middle of the road waving both arms. It stops, and we’re picked up by a guy in an F-350 hauling a horse trailer. He’s a rider on the Indian rodeo circuit, he says, and his horse is named Mud. He takes us to a bar where Grimshaw lays five dollars on the edge of a pool table, lights a cigarette, and waits.
I sit at the bar and watch. Many eyes from the shadowy depths of the bar follow her every move. She has all the attention in the room. She looks so confident, it’s hard to believe she was ever stupid enough to be with a guy like Mike Lyle. Soon enough, there’s another five on top of hers, put there by a guy with long sideburns and a leather vest and a red scar on his cheek. She chalks her pool cue. As she leans over the pool table to break the triangle, she shoves her hair back and it catches the light. She lifts her eyes to meet mine and winks at me. I smile back at her. This is going to be good. I spent many hours in the basement of her little home by the highway, watching her play pool. Of all her brothers, Ruby was the only one who could ever beat her.
All of a sudden, it hits me: I won. We’re gone, and Mike Lyle has no idea where we are. We’re safe now, and we’re free. I went way behind enemy lines, and I won the whole damn war. I harpooned the white whale, and now I am the white whale. A sense of victory washes over me that is so pure and so sweet and so unfamiliar that I’m not really sure how to handle it. For me, this is the high honor roll. I turn around to face the bartender.
“You might want to turn that smile down a couple notches,” the bartender observes. “You don’t want to get in trouble.”
“I’m not afraid of trouble,” I tell him, still smiling.
“No?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.”
“If that’s the case, there’s a guy at the end of the bar who wants to buy you a drink.”
“Okay.”
Soon a man named Smokey is sitting on the stool next to me. Smokey is not young. Smokey has a very large black cowboy hat, which when he lifts it up to say hello, reveals a very shiny bald head. His hands are so smooth and brown they look like they’re carved out of wood.
“You two not from around here?” Smokey asks me.
“No.”
“Travelin’ through?”
“Basically.”
“Your friend sure knows how to handle a pool cue.”
Smokey and I watch Grimshaw sink the eight ball, and then another guy puts a ten on top of the fives that are now hers. I get my groove back for my independent study and ask Smokey a couple of questions about upward mobility. He says his parents were wheat farmers in South Dakota and as soon as his feet could reach the pedals, he was running a combine fourteen hours a day, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s been upward ever since. I try a guy a couple stools to my right, but he just shakes his head. At closing time, our rodeo rider takes us to a double-wide trailer, gets his mother out of bed, and she throws sleeping bags for us down on the living room carpet. When we get up in the morning, there are about half a dozen kids around the kitchen table, and one old man asleep with his chin on his chest. Grimshaw and I squeeze in, and Dori
s—that’s the mother’s name—feeds us fried rice and fried eggs and fried bread. I think she even fried the coffee.
Grimshaw looks up at Doris from across the table and smiles. “I’m from a big family, too,” she says. “I’m the youngest.”
The old man wakes up. He lifts up his cup of coffee. He clears his throat. “Here’s to Mother,” he croaks. He raises his coffee cup. I reach across the table and touch cups with him and Grimshaw.
After the children are gone, we have another cup of coffee, take showers, have another cup of coffee, and then Doris drives us out to the road, a two-lane highway threading through the Lone Pine Indian Reservation, which is where it turns out we spent the night. The road is empty in both directions. Our shadows stretch halfway to the horizon. The hills to the west have snow on them. The sun coming in low paints them gold. Grimshaw faces them with her hands on her hips.
“I wish Mike were here right now,” she sighs. “Can you believe it? I really miss him.”
Maybe it’s because it is so unexpected, but the sound of his name has a profound physical impact on me. I see the black body stocking coiled around his hands like a rope, and the victory I was celebrating last night turns to ash. She wouldn’t go back with him, would she? I hear a roaring in my ears, and all the blood drains out of my head. I have to bend over with my hands on my knees to keep from falling down.
“I’d give anything to hear his voice right now,” I hear her saying, as if through a long tunnel. Her back is still to me. “You gotta admit it, Mike has a very sexy voice.” She sits down on her suitcase. “Especially in the morning. He can sing, too. I love it when he sings.”
I stand up. The blood comes back into my head with a rush. My vision fogs in from the edges, leaving me a circle to look through. There’s a crow sitting on the dead branch of a pine tree in front of me. I watch it until the dizziness clears.
“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just how I feel.” A trailer truck comes over the hill. I watch the crow flap slowly away, cawing. Grimshaw stands up.
The Spaces Between Us Page 16